More than a decade after Desmond Tutu helped end apartheid, he shows no signs of slowing down as he turns 77 on Tuesday, and is still an outspoken advocate for justice in South Africa and around the globe.
The retired archbishop will spend his birthday with fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter in Cyprus, to encourage reunification of the divided island.
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, Tutu joined negotiation efforts from the Middle East to Sudan and Kenya, while also speaking out against human rights abuses in Burma and Zimbabwe and in support of gay bishops.
He once called Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe a ”caricature of an African dictator”, sparking a war of words with Mugabe, who called Tutu an ”evil little bishop”.
At home, he spent the week before his birthday launching a campaign to end discrimination against the disabled, and speaking out about the political turmoil within South Africa’s ruling party, which he says has left him so disillusioned that he might not vote in next year’s polls.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Tutu said that his old friend Nelson Mandela was ”hurt by some of the things that happened after he stepped down”.
”Some of the things that have happened have not been the kind of things we imagined happening,” said Tutu.
He pointed particularly to recent statements by the leader of the African National Congress Youth League, which said that it would ”take up arms and kill for” party chief Jacob Zuma.
Zuma and former president Thabo Mbeki have feuded for years, culminating dramatically last month when the party chief forced Mbeki to step down as president.
Improve your argument
”They have had some very strange leadership in the youth league,” Tutu said. ”It is very distressing to think that is the body that did produce some of our upstanding leaders.”
”I wish they would learn to engage in discourse that is civil. My father used to say: ‘Improve your argument, don’t raise your voice’,” he said.
Tutu told the Sunday Times that he would not vote in the 2009 election, unless the ANC healed its divisions.
He told the paper he would only vote if there were attempts at healing rifts.
He also lamented the lack of accountability by the party and said ordinary South Africans had no respect for the rule of law.
Tutu explained why it is so important for him to give of himself to others.
”It is not because I am modest that I say I am so much aware of how much I owe to other people,” Tutu said.
”I know I owe a great deal to my mother who was not very educated, and was a domestic worker … she was such an incredible woman, very caring,” he said, remembering that she always cooked more than the family needed just in case ”someone may come who is hungry”.
Although he played a key role pressing the white-minority government to bring about democracy, Tutu maintains he became a leader ”by default” as he became the Anglican Church’s first black dean of Johannesburg.
At that time, leaders like Mandela were imprisoned, and others were either exiled or dead.
Tutu opposed the apartheid government at every turn, supporting disinvestment which pressured the regime into dismantling the race-based political system.
Later he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is widely credited with helping smooth the country’s transition to democracy.
Tutu says most of his life has ”been a bonus”, after he survived an illness believed to be polio as a baby, and later battled tuberculosis as a teenager and prostrate cancer more recently.
Although he retired as archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, a full retirement from public life is not in the cards.
”Don’t ask that question. My wife sometimes probably wants to strangle me a little bit,” he said.
”I was going to, three years after officially retiring, to wind down but I am afraid … no,” he said, his voice trailing off as he shook his head. – AFP
